Roman and Williams’s moment officially began in the fall of 2009, when a pair of ultrachic New York hotels designed by the husband-and-wife partnership of Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer opened more or less simultaneously. Between them, the Standard and the Ace Hotel generated a level of buzz not seen since the early-1990s hotel reign of Philippe Starck.

In some ways the two Roman and Williams interiors couldn’t be more different—“a silk high heel and a big muddy boot,” according to Alesch, the firm’s de facto architect, draftsman, and furniture designer (Standefer could be considered its creative director). The Standard has a throwback polish, evoking Milanese bachelor pads and the golden age of railway travel. The Ace is moodier, with salvaged-wood floors, post-and-beam ceilings, and pendant lamps fashioned from plumbing joints. But both share a kitsch-free nostalgia—allusive, paradoxically modern-feeling, and resonantly cool.

“The way they mix styles and old things feels so personal. It has a sense of warmth,” says Alex Calderwood, one of the hoteliers behind the Ace. Their designs also have narrative, a graspable sense of story. What was Standefer’s narrative for the Ace? “A grand, dilapidated country house the Rolling Stones holed up in to make a record,” she says. “Or maybe it’s the old-money retreat where a kid threw a big party when his parents weren’t around, and he and his friends trashed the place.”

Many of their peers, the couple says, suffer from an overweening up-to-dateness, rejecting as primitive or passé whatever feels old and employing production techniques so refined they strip objects of any evidence of human effort. In recent projects, which have included homes for Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow, as well as a new restaurant, the Dutch, in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, Roman and Williams has taken the opposite approach. To illustrate, Alesch, in the firm’s Lafayette Street design studio in New York, shows off a set of brass bathtub fittings manufactured to his specifications at a factory in France. “They made them too perfect at first,” he says. “They thought I was crazy, but I managed to persuade them to leave the seams showing.”

FOLLOW US

Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 5/25/18). Architectural Digest may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Your California Privacy Rights The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices